Matija Čop

Matija Čop (pronounced [maˈtiːja ˈtʃɔp]; 26 January 1797 – 6 July 1835), also known in German as Matthias Tschop, was a Slovene linguist, polyglot, literary historian and critic.

Čop was born in the small northern Carniolan town of Žirovnica,[1] in what was then the Habsburg monarchy (now in Slovenia), into a relatively wealthy peasant family.

In 1817, he returned from Vienna and attended a priest seminary until 1820, when he left it to become a secondary school teacher in Rijeka, Croatia.

Unlike such contemporaries as the linguist Jernej Kopitar and the poet Stanko Vraz, Čop believed in the possibility of the development of a distinctive Slovenian national culture.

His broad cosmopolitan education enabled him to recognise the poetic talent of France Prešeren, which remained unnoticed by most of his contemporaries, and to advise him on stylistic and linguistic issues.